About
About Me
My name is Jeremiah Dickey. I’m an Engineer at Sandia National Laboratories who has a love for engineering and aeronautical gadgets. I graduated from Berkeley’s College of Engineering in the Summer of 2011 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. I began developing this blog upon graduating in order to keep my skills sharp and to have a creative outlet while searching for employment.
quadcopterproject 
hi my name is Salih and i like this page very much i study aeronautical engineering and this is my last year. my graduation project is to design a quad-copter i hope you can give me the info that i need
thanks…..
Thanks for checking out my blog. I’m glad you find it informative. I’d be happy to answer any questions you have.
how can i Analise this quad rotor using CFD(Computational fluid dynamics
Unfortunately I have never used CFD software so I don’t have a good answer for you. On the otherhand, my analysis performed and documented on my blog eliminates the need for any advanced analysis tools like CFD. My process involves blade momentum theory and empirical data. So check out the appropriate section and let me know if you still have questions.
Greetings,
The approach you’ve explained is very promising and i could frame my basic layout for doing a conceptual design of a multicopter using this.
Hello Jeremiah, my name is Eduardo, i´m from Brasil. I want to make a quadcopter to my final project. I read your blog and i learn so much ! I will use only the accelerometer, but i see u use accelerometer, gyroscope and compass… Why u use the others 2? I need only keep it stabilized. Can i use only accelerometer?
Thanks for all
Hi Eduardo,
As illustrated in Figure 2 of this blog, an object in 3 dimensions have 6 possible modes of movement: 3 translational and 3 rotational. A three axis accelerometer will get you translation. Of course the output of an accelerometer is acceleration, so integrating the signal twice will yield position (remember these fundamental equations and how to integrate them – dv/dt=a and dx/dt=v).
I’m not sure if you can make a quadcopter with just an accelerometer. As an example of a problem, your accelerometer could read 0 acceleration while spinning out of control. The gyro is required for stability in the 3 remaining modes or movement: Pitch, roll, and yaw in aeronautics are rotation about x, y, and z in regular physics.
Now that you have covered all 6 axis of movements, you need to take sensor drift into consideration. Sensor drift happens in all sensors and can really mess up the stability of your quadcopter. For example, a gyro exhibits drift in yaw when your quadcopter starts out stationary then gradually increases in rotational velocity about the yaw direction without user input. There isn’t much you can do about accelerometer drift without adding an additional input like GPS. Gyro drift is easy to compensate for using a three axis compass. The compass will give you a true direction for pitch, roll, and yaw.
Now the hard part: integrating and managing all the sensor inputs, including user inputs, with a control system. I would start with a PID style infrastructure. I started to look into this myself, but time constants and a lack of patience lead me to use an AeroQuad shield. The AeroQuad system comes with a shield that a Arduino micro-controller plugs into and all the software and programing required to fly your quad, and it’s software is free to download. I would suggest downloading and dissecting their Arduino script to find out how they did it. Good luck Edwardo.
THANK DUDE!!!
FOR OUR EFFORT,,
Thank you! Please send me a link to your project video. Have fun!
Thanks so much for posting your analysis and @@@”@”&@o99 on the web.
My local science museum is putting mon a Math Expo for 7th graders, I thought a contemporary topic to exhibit would be Drone Math.I’m a BSEE oqm
. OK with the motor nameplates & electrical calcs, but needed some help on the
M
props, pitch, and thrust. The feedback comments are also really helpful.
Thank you, I hope this inspires them to all give quadcopter building and an engineering career a try.
M
I’m so glad you like the blog. I’d be happy to help anyway I can. I’m working on a new analysis. It looks promising when compared to empirical. I’m working on the draft writeup as we speak. I’ll send you some stuff tomorrow or the next day.